OnStartups

Apologies for the somewhat off-topic nature of this post. I generally make it a point to only write articles that I think would be interesting and useful to my readers. This one’s in the gray area. If you’re not the forgiving type, you can safely ignore this article. We’ll go back to our regularly scheduled startup-centric content tomorrow. (For the record, my “signal vs. noise” ratio on this blog is, I think, pretty high. Unlike some blogs I know).

How I Broke In To The Technorati 10,000Quick Answer: Writing, Writing, Writing. Didn’t want to trick you into reading this entire article, so I thought I’d share the quick answer up front. Fact is, I didn’t do anything special (other than post content regularly that I thought would be interesting to my readers). No aces up my sleeve and no “super-secret squirrel codes” that I can share with you to raise your Technorati ranking. I’m not even sure being in the top 10,000 blogs is all that big a deal – but stated differently, that I’m in the top 1% of all blogs being ranked, sounds a wee bit better. It impresses my friends and family, anyways.

Brief history: This blog was first started on November 5, 2005 (so it’s about 7 months old). Sometime earlier this year, I “claimed” the blog on Technorati. I kept hearing about Technorati and it’s rankings, so I figured it would be another good way to build visibility for the blog as evidently many users use Technorati as their primary search engine for blogs. Personally, I hadn’t had much success with Technorati, but I figured hundreds of thousands of other people couldn’t all be wrong.

When the blog was first claimed, my Technorati rank was about 1.1 million. That is to say, out of the 17 million odd blogs that Technorati claimed to be ranking, I was in the top 1.1 million. Not really much to brag about. I’m guessing this was probably driven by just a couple of random links to the blog at the time.

Since then, I’ve been monitoring my ranking (though I’m not as obsessed with it as I am my RSS subscriber count or my web traffic volume). Within a couple of months, I had moved to 220,000. A couple of months after that, and I was at about 18,000.

And now, here I am at Technorati Rank #9,832.

So, what does all this mean? I have no clue. Not sure if my performance was about average or what. Further, I still am not convinced that the Technorati ranking is really a particularly accurate measure of a blog’s popularity. From what I know, it does not weigh inbound links, but just counts them. I would think that if Guy Kawasaki ever linked to me, it should be worth more than if I got a link from some random blog with minimal popularity.

There are a few things that I’d like to note regarding Technorati and my experience with it:

I didn’t really make any conscious effort to “lift” my rankings (as there was really no big motivation to do so). However, it would seem that this would be easy to do, if one were properly motivated.

There has been only one time (that I know of) that I actually moved backwards in the rankings (I went from 10,000 something back to 11,000 something for a little while). Other than that, it seems to be a progressive “climb”, which I’m guessing is fairly common.

To this day, I have gotten almost zero site traffic from Technorati. This may mean that like Google, if you’re not on the first few “hits” for a search, it really doesn’t matter. Perhaps if I ever break through into the Technorati 1,000, things will be different.

Technorati is still pretty much hit or miss for me in terms of the site even working. I’ve read that I’m not the only one having this experience. I can understand that dealing with the kind of traffic they do is non-trivial, but still…

As far as I can tell, there is no real regularity as to when the rankings themselves get updated. This seems to be pretty random too. Sometimes it’s the next day, and other times, several days can go by before the number is updated. I’m also unsure as to whether only blogs that have been “claimed” impact the Technorati ranking, or if it reaches beyond that and finds all the “unregistered” blogs out there by doing some type of spidering.

I like how Technorati provides a simple API so that one can programmatically determine ranking (and information about the inbound links). If I cared enough about this, or thought it would bring value to my HubSpot clients, I’d likely build some type of simple monitoring tool that tracked this stuff. But, I don’t, so I haven’t. I have built something simple to track Google rankings for specific phrases, because people seem to be interested in this.

That’s it. No brilliant insight. Not sure if there’s any to be had.

Summary of my Point: I made it to the Technorati 10,000. You can too. But, still not sure that it matters at all and will surely not impact your startup in any appreciable way.

Marc

I don't think traffic counts as much as being able to reach your target audience. When I started blogging late last month it was a "work blog" and in fact it remains a work blog. But the point is I'm aiming to get more VCs (not just the ones I know/work with) to read it, and it will take some time experimenting with the formula. However, I've already got one random VC (from Brazil) who stopped by and left a great comment and when I went to his blog I was really impressed with the point he made about Google. So the blog has become not just a platform to publish opinion statements but also a listening post a potential for becoming a networking magnet.

When developers leave comments on my blog regarding business issues they often miss the point and I have to explain the point, but I can't "understand" the point for them :) So I'd rather have a very focused but small traffic (namely, VCs and executives at startups who are "technically" inclined but have not written code or designed a chip etc in at least 10 years!) than hundreds of thousands of hits from all over the place.

Marc

Marc

I don't think traffic counts as much as being able to reach your target audience. When I started blogging late last month it was a "work blog" and in fact it remains a work blog. But the point is I'm aiming to get more VCs (not just the ones I know/work with) to read it, and it will take some time experimenting with the formula. However, I've already got one random VC (from Brazil) who stopped by and left a great comment and when I went to his blog I was really impressed with the point he made about Google. So the blog has become not just a platform to publish opinion statements but also a listening post a potential for becoming a networking magnet.

When developers leave comments on my blog regarding business issues they often miss the point and I have to explain the point, but I can't "understand" the point for them :) So I'd rather have a very focused but small traffic (namely, VCs and executives at startups who are "technically" inclined but have not written code or designed a chip etc in at least 10 years!) than hundreds of thousands of hits from all over the place.

Marc

darose

If you're curious where some of your traffic comes from, I found you from reddit. Several of your posts have appeared on there, which I read (red?) and thought were pretty insightful, so I subscribed to your feed.

darose

If you're curious where some of your traffic comes from, I found you from reddit. Several of your posts have appeared on there, which I read (red?) and thought were pretty insightful, so I subscribed to your feed.

As number 6,909 on TechnoratiI can attest to the lack of traffic from Technorait. However, just counting links *is* a good measure of a blog's influence/readership. Guy's attempt to get in the top ten is commendable. But Technorati is just the score keeper.

Anonymous

As number 6,909 on TechnoratiI can attest to the lack of traffic from Technorait. However, just counting links *is* a good measure of a blog's influence/readership. Guy's attempt to get in the top ten is commendable. But Technorati is just the score keeper.

I wanted to jump in and say that I don't get many hits through Technorati either. But I still think it's pretty cool that you are in the top 10,000! At leat you're making progress and still climbing. Good work!

I wanted to jump in and say that I don't get many hits through Technorati either. But I still think it's pretty cool that you are in the top 10,000! At leat you're making progress and still climbing. Good work!

CONTENT IS KING!! It is now becoming wide-spread technical fact; content is the only thing that drives traffic. It must be well-written, spelled correctly, and usable by the reader. Second to this is the title of the post/article. It has to be relevant to the subject matter;not artsy or arcane. To the point. If you write good articles that are useful to the reader, they will return again and again; and thus, your traffic will grow. Quality over quantity.

CONTENT IS KING!! It is now becoming wide-spread technical fact; content is the only thing that drives traffic. It must be well-written, spelled correctly, and usable by the reader. Second to this is the title of the post/article. It has to be relevant to the subject matter;not artsy or arcane. To the point. If you write good articles that are useful to the reader, they will return again and again; and thus, your traffic will grow. Quality over quantity.

Marc

The major point no one else has addressed in their comments (yet) is quantity vs quality of traffic. Not everyone is interested in having ads on their blog, and for those type of blogs 100 hits a day from the blog's target market is much better than 8,000 random hits.

Marc

The major point no one else has addressed in their comments (yet) is quantity vs quality of traffic. Not everyone is interested in having ads on their blog, and for those type of blogs 100 hits a day from the blog's target market is much better than 8,000 random hits.

Marc

To clarify, I meant no one has addressed the "quality of the readers" (not quality of the posts.) If you want artsy people to visit your site and repell those who are not into artsy stuff then you would have artsy titles. It's a self-selection filter. Obviously, you decide what audience you want and you match your content to it.

Marc

To clarify, I meant no one has addressed the "quality of the readers" (not quality of the posts.) If you want artsy people to visit your site and repell those who are not into artsy stuff then you would have artsy titles. It's a self-selection filter. Obviously, you decide what audience you want and you match your content to it.

Bina

The best thing about your blogs are that they are very easy to read and understand even for a beginner and who has no idea about the business world. Thank you for sharing your real life experiences. If one day I start a 'startup' I am sure you're blogs/advice/articles will be of great value.

Bina

The best thing about your blogs are that they are very easy to read and understand even for a beginner and who has no idea about the business world. Thank you for sharing your real life experiences. If one day I start a 'startup' I am sure you're blogs/advice/articles will be of great value.